


3

by leiascully



Series: The FBI's Most Unwanted [33]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Abduction, Alien Abduction, Canon-Typical Violence, Episode Related, Gen, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-05
Updated: 2015-08-05
Packaged: 2018-04-13 02:15:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4503984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He couldn't work his way through the loss of her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	3

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: 2.07 "3"  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

He sat on the hillside and let the smoke drift past him. November in California wasn't as hot as August in DC, but he was still weary, heatsick and heartsick. The cut on his throat stung. The air scorched his lungs. Scully's cross caught the light as it dangled from his fingers. He had no idea how to say the rosary, and her necklace wasn't right for it, but he talked to her anyway, in the haunted house inside his head.

_Bless me, Scully, for I have sinned._

Before Scully, he had often walked the fine line between method and madness. He had valued answers over his own life. She had made him think twice about sacrificing himself to a quest that would swallow him whole and spit out his bones, if he was lucky enough to leave any trace at all. She had convinced him there were better fates than martyrdom.

Without Scully as ballast he descended too deeply into his work, and surfaced too quickly. One of these days he would run out of air or give himself the bends. It amounted to the same thing: the plaque with his name on it tossed into the garbage, a call and a check for his mother. He wondered if Margaret would come to his funeral. He wondered if, with the Mulder dilemma permanently resolved, perhaps whoever had taken Scully would give her back. 

He would let it happen, if it meant They would bring her back, although he knew it was not the scenario Scully would hope for. But she would mourn him and move on. She wouldn't waste her life tilting at windmills, especially when the windmills were just as likely to fire back. 

He pulled the fine chain between his fingers. The metal was sharp and sleek against his dirty skin. _Blessed art thou among women. Blessed, praised, glorified, exalted, extolled, mighty, upraised, and lauded._

The upraised part was a little on the nose, but appealing to a higher power had never been his strong suit. Scully would have laughed. He imagined her settling down beside him in the dead grass, wrapping her arms around her knees in unconscious imitation of him, letting the silence between them ripen into conversation in its own time.

"I'm sorry," he said to the shade of her. "I know it was stupid."

"You had unprotected sex with a woman who freely admits to drinking other people's blood, Mulder?" he imagined her saying, and the greatest part of her disappointment in him was that once again he'd treated himself as if his life was disposable. It wasn't the sex, although he was certain there would be a part of her that might ache to hear that he had touched another woman, just as he had felt a pang when she had had dates. It was that he had had a choice, and he had made the wrong one. The dangerous one. He had saved lives, potentially, but at the risk of his own. Kristen might have slit his throat, and that would have been the easiest of the deaths he might face. There were doctors in his future, but not the doctor he wanted, and blood, but not the blood he'd sought. 

"I can't sleep," he said to the Scully in his mind, as if that explained everything. As if she could read his grief and his loneliness and his desperation in the bruisey shadows under his eyes. But they had always understood each other's shorthand. 

"Why can't you sleep, Mulder?" he imagined her asking, in the gentle voice she usually saved for traumatized children and the verifiably insane. He wondered which he was in her eyes.

"I couldn't stop him," he told her. "I can't find you. I don't know if I'll ever see you again."

"And you won't let me go," she said. It wasn't a question. He almost laughed to himself on the hillside, a painful sound that turned into a cough. There wouldn't have been any point to asking that question. He held up the cross so it glinted in the light. He had been chasing his sister for twenty years; there was room in his heart for another ghost. The space that Scully had left behind was bigger than the space she'd taken up in the car, in the office, at his shoulder. 

"No," he said. "No, Scully, I won't let you go."

"Then hold on tight," she said, and he thought he could feel her hand squeeze his shoulder. "Maybe there's hope."

His laugh rasped again into a cough and then a sob, and he was weeping, his eyes stinging with the smoke from the fire. Tears pattered into the dry grass or soaked blotches on his dusty dress pants. He was alone. Even the sirens had faded.

He couldn't work his way through the loss of her. He couldn't drink his way through it, or fight his way through it, or fuck his way through it. But he could eat. He could sleep. He could run. He could get himself up in the morning and come home at night instead of hunting monsters in the dark. He could make the right choices when his path forked, so that he'd be alive when she returned, or at least so that his life honored the sacrifice of her. She had given so much. He had no illusions that it had been for the cause and not for the man. She had given her all, and all of it to him, and it was a gift too precious to discard. Kristen too had given herself over to the dream of the men she followed. He was sorry for that too, but she had chosen her own ending. There was some sort of salvation in that, the kind Scully had not found in the trunk of a car.

The hot flat-yellow sky hid the stars, but he looked to them anyway, Scully's cross clenched in his fist, pressed over his heart.


End file.
